1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to a real time on line communications and more particularly to on line text messaging.
2. Background Description
Personal productivity applications or tools are well known and readily available for everyday use. Examples of such personal productivity tools include state of the art communications tools such as instant messaging applications and e-mail, as well as personal information manager (PIM) software. These personal productivity tools are available as individual stand alone applications (e.g., America Online (AOL) Instant Messenger (AIM) from AOL, Eudora from Qualcomm Inc., and Palm Desktop from Palm, Inc.) or, integrated in a single office suite, e.g., Microsoft (MS) Outlook in MS Office from Microsoft Corporation. Further, personal productivity tools are available for a wide range of platforms, ranging from small hand held devices such as what are known as personal digital assistants (PDAs) and web enabled or third generation (3G) cell phones to larger personal computers (PCs) and even to distributed or Internet based platforms. These personal productivity applications can streamline communications and improve user productivity and, when used selectively, can realize significant cost savings by reducing wasted resources.
For example e-mail is most effective in fire and forget type communications, where each e-mail message is sent for receipt at some subsequent time, e.g., an hour later, several hours later, days later and etc. Each e-mail message requires significant overhead, e.g., a sender e-mail address, a recipient e-mail address, a transmission path, a subject, a salutation, the message (as few as one or more words), a close that may include a transmission warning or disclaimer. Very often each e-mail includes previous messages in an e-mail exchange, which further bloats the size of the each message. Instant messaging (IM) is most effective for real time private chat with rapid fire contemporaneous queries and responses being sent and received. Once an IM connection is made, only the message content need to be sent. So, by contrast instant messaging is low overhead.
If a comment is IM'ed and a response follows several hours later, the response may be missed completely. Likewise an e-mail exchange, especially of short messages, may take significantly longer, e.g., hours, and consume a higher level of system resources to convey what might be IM'ed in a few minutes. Often, for example, rather than continue to exchange e-mails, one party may grow weary and just phone the other to complete the exchange conversation. As a result system resources are wasted rather than conserved.
Thus, there is a need for a way to efficiently communicate in real time without wasting available resources.